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Do you support a path to citizenship for Dreamers?

Return fireMitchell E. Daniels Jr., the White House budget chief, has not forgotten the Shakespearean insult hurled at him by Sen. Robert C. Byrd in July, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes."Upon what meat doth this our little Caesar feed?" the West Virginia Democrat said of Mr. Daniels, quoting the Bard.When the reporter asked the budget director about Mr. Byrd's quote, Mr. Daniels replied: "Well, I don't see any resemblance. Except Caesar was assassinated in the Senate, remember that?"

Hope for Owen"After a month in which all appeared to be lost, some Republicans in Washington are now expressing a cautious hope a very cautious hope that Priscilla Owen, President Bush's nominee to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, will win a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee," Byron York writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com)."The committee has scheduled a business meeting for Thursday, Sept. 5, and, although the agenda has not been announced, it might well include a vote on the Owen nomination. The committee is divided between 10 Democrats and nine Republicans, meaning Owen needs just one Democratic vote to go along with unanimous GOP support for her nomination to be sent to the full Senate for a confirmation vote," Mr. York said."So far, no Democrat has publicly voiced support for Owen. At the end of July, when Democrats attempted to hold a quickie vote on the nomination, it was thought that committee chairman Patrick Leahy had united his party's senators against Owen. 'Three weeks ago, it was so obvious that they were gunning for her that everybody assumed they would lock down their side into voting no, and that would be the end of it,' says one Republican. But the vote was delayed on a routine procedural motion, and the Senate went home for its August recess."Now, it is not clear whether Democrats are united in their opposition to Owen, and Republicans are looking to next Thursday as an indicator of the majority's position. 'The information we have is that Leahy will put her on the schedule for the 5th if he has the votes,' says one Republican, 'but he will not do it if he determines that he does not have the votes.' So from the GOP perspective, a vote Thursday would be bad news, but a Leahy postponement would be a positive sign for Owen."

Giuliani still angryFormer New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani says in a published essay that one year hasn't done anything to lessen his anger over the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon."I haven't changed. When I go to ground zero now I feel as shocked, angry and resolute as I did a year ago," Mr. Giuliani writes in Time magazine this week.He said talking about it, especially with people who were directly affected, helps deal with the "lasting pain.""I try to confront what was done to us and the importance of being resolute," he writes.Calling ground zero "a cemetery," Mr. Giuliani said he wants the entire 16-acre site to become a memorial to the approximately 2,800 people who were killed."If we let some minor memorial be dwarfed by office space, people a hundred years from now will say this generation did not understand the significance of that world-altering day," he writes.

A test caseErskine Bowles, who is expected to be the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat from North Carolina, is having a hard time competing with likely Republican nominee Elizabeth Dole.Mr. Bowles, the chief of staff to President Clinton, trailed Mrs. Dole 61 percent to 29 percent in a poll taken in July, Jason Zengerle notes in the latest issue of the New Republic."Bowles' self-consciously substantive, unflashy campaign the mirror opposite of Dole's experiment in contentless political celebrity makes for an interesting retroactive test case," Mr. Zengerle writes."Ever since Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, some Democrats have maintained that if Gore had just campaigned as the smarter, more engaged candidate that he actually was instead of masking his superior intellect and experience in a bid to look as much a 'regular guy' as Bush he, rather than W., would now be in the White House. This is the operating premise of the ongoing presidential campaign on the TV show 'The West Wing,' the alternative political universe that Aaron Sorkin has constructed for disaffected Democrats. As Sorkin has imagined it (and as he told the New Yorker in March), the Nobel Laureate President Josiah Bartlet will try to beat his Republican challenger, the not-so-sharp Florida Governor Robert Ritchie, by making the 'election about smart and stupid, about engaged and not, qualified and not.'"In TVland, this gambit will undoubtedly work. (The show's ratings are too high for its stars to be voted out of the White House just yet.) But in the real world, the Sorkin strategy isn't so surefire. While it might be nice to think that smarter, more engaged candidates really do win elections, sometimes personality and presentation matter most as Erskine Bowles is finding out."

A lack of diversity"It's hard to think of an ideal propounded with more fervor on our nation's campuses than that of diversity. So it is with more than passing interest that we noticed a new study confirming that when it comes to the political allegiances of college faculties, there is no such animal," the Wall Street Journal says."Even for those to whom this comes as no news, the study just published in American Enterprise magazine shows a uniformity of political allegiance in major university faculties that is positively breathtaking. The researchers visited Boards of Elections in the areas of 21 colleges or universities, including such institutions as Cornell, Brown, Harvard, Penn State, Stanford, Syracuse, Berkeley, UCLA, the State University of New York at Binghamton and the University of Colorado," the newspaper said in an editorial."The study divided the parties into right or left: Republican or Libertarian on the right, and Democrat, Green or the like on the left. At Cornell, they found one English Department member in a party of the right, as opposed to 35 registered on the left. In the History Department they found no one registered on the right, but 29 on the left. "That this lack of faculty diversity eludes university administrators is especially interesting given the totality of their efforts to re-order all other aspects of campus life based on that principle. In the name of this cardinal value, administrators target groups for recruitment, shape curricula, designate some sports for funding in the name of gender equity while cutting others, and so much more. It's virtually impossible to imagine any university president delivering a major address not saturated with references to diversity and his or her own allegiance thereto."We favor diversity, too. We simply look forward to the day that college administrators stop preening about the principle long enough to see how little of it exists among the most powerful and influential force on campus their own teachers."

Support for warAn overwhelming number of Americans support military action against Iraq, according to a survey by the Los Angeles Times.Fifty-nine percent of Americans believed the United States should take military action to remove Saddam from power, 29 percent were opposed, and 12 percent were unsure, the poll showed.An even larger majority 64 percent said they would support a ground attack on Iraq, if President Bush decided to launch one, according to the survey.However, 61 percent of those who support military action said they believed Washington should attack Baghdad only if the international community supported the move.The poll also found that public support for war with Iraq might drop significantly if U.S. forces suffered significant casualties.

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